Absentee ballots are used in elections to allow registered voters to cast their ballots remotely. Therefore, some states have provisions for emailing ballots, faxing ballots, or delivering them in person to a designated location.
However, the delivery process and counting of these ballots are not free from errors that could prevent the processing of cast votes. To this end, several proposals have been focused on reducing these issues with more or less success.
The proposal of the method and system described in this invention is to solve all these issues, including the ones not yet solved by other proposals. Below we will analyze the different problems, how are they managed by the currently existing solutions and how our proposal covers the gaps not yet solved by these solutions.
Blank Ballot Delivery by Mail
The absentee ballots are usually sent initially by post to the voters. This process is usually called blank ballot delivery. Then, the voter marks her selections in the blank ballot and mails it back to her State election officials for its counting. Once the marked absentee ballots are received in the central election offices, they are counted either manually or electronically.
However, this system presents several problems:                Blank ballot delivery on time: One of the most challenging issues in absentee voting is how to bring the ballots to the absentee voters on time. The initial blank ballot delivery time depends on the deadline for the addition of candidates or questions to the ballot, and it is usually close to the start of the voting period. Therefore, postal mail is not always fast enough to deliver the ballots on time for filling and mailing them back to the state in the time period assigned to the absentee voting process. In fact, several times, absentee ballots have not been accepted in the vote recount for arriving late. Therefore, absentee voters are disenfranchised.        Manual marking of optical scanner votes: Usually, most States use optical scanning for electronic counting of in person votes. Furthermore, the electoral law forces them to use the same counting system for absentee voters. Therefore, in these cases, election officers need to count the absentee ballots thought optical scanners. Postal votes cannot be directly fed into the optical scanners since they are folded inside the envelope (folded sheets tend to stuck in optical scanners). Therefore, electoral officers are in charge of manually copying the selections coming from these absentee votes to the optical scanner compatible votes. This leads to the possibility of human errors or malicious electoral officers modifying the contents of the absentee votes.        Invalid votes due to voter mistakes: The blank ballot is manually marked, and it is not checked after the time of counting. Therefore, the voter cannot be warned while filling the ballot in case she is making any mistake that could invalidate it (e.g. under-voting or over-voting). The result is that a considerable amount of absentee votes are invalidated and the voter it is not aware about it.        
Therefore, alternative absentee ballot delivery methods have been introduced recently, like the electronic blank ballot delivery, or the online ballot marking.
Electronic Blank Ballot Delivery
In the electronic blank ballot delivery proposal, the voter accesses to a web service to download her blank ballot in an electronic format. Then, voter prints the blank ballot and manually fills in. The mailing back and counting process is the same than in the mail blank ballot delivery system.
This system solves the problem of the blank ballot delivery on time, but it does not address issues on the manual marking of optical scanner votes or having absentee invalid votes due to voter mistakes.
Online Ballot Marking
In case of online ballot marking, the voter accesses to a web application that displays the voting options and guides her through the process of making her selections. At this point, the marked ballot is printed in paper to mail or fax it back to the state.
This system solves the problems of blank ballot delivery on time and prevention of voter mistakes while filling the ballot. Regarding the manual marking of the votes to be read in optical scanners, despite there are some proposals in this area, none of them solve this issue.
The Open Voting Consortium [1] and EveryoneCounts [2] propose a system for electronic ballot marking that prints the marked ballot in paper and attaches a bar code representing the voting options. After the voting phase, the barcodes of these votes are read with a barcode reader to perform an electronic count, but in any case they are proposing any method for creating a vote that can be processed by an optical scanner. Therefore, these systems cannot be used in the States were election officers need to count the votes using optical scanning. Furthermore, the format of the ballot is not the same as the ones cast in polling stations. Therefore, they are distinguishable from these votes in a manual counting process.
In the state of the art, there are other proposals, like AutoMark (U.S. Pat. No. 7,753,273) or Populex (U.S. Pat. No. 7,306,148), that provide an electronic interface for ballot marking and printing of votes in a format suitable to be read by an optical scanner. However, these proposals are related to specific devices designed to be used in polling places. Therefore, these solutions cannot be used in absentee voting processes since they cannot be distributed to voters (i.e., they have a standalone architecture).
The object of the present invention is a ballot marking method suitable to be used in a voting computer by an absentee voter that generates an element representing the voting options in a physical machine readable media, such as a printed bar code. On the reception of this generated element in the election central office, the information of the generated element is used for issuing a printed ballot that is suitable for being processed by an optical scanner or manual counting. The difference with the existing proposals is that the information of the generated element (e.g., bar code contents) is not processed for generating a result, but for generating a paper ballot that has exactly the same appearance as the paper ballots from non-absentee voters. Therefore, absentee ballots can be counted by the same automated means (e.g., optical scanning machines) used for counting the paper ballots from the rest of the voters.